Archive of Our Own ^beta

And when the plane came in, she said she was crashing

The velvet, it rips in the city

We tripped on the urge to feel alive

But now, I'm struggling to survive - Third Eye Blind, Semi-Charmed Life

Zelos shines brightly on the stage because that is what he is the best at - the art of performing. Every night he glides around the pole, crimson locks dancing behind him, winks at beautiful women and the occasional man who ventures out to his dwelling, and gives them a brilliant show as if it’s his last. To them, he is the Chosen, the shining star that embraces everybody and welcomes them to his personal orgy, sweet talking them, filling up their heads with their own infatuation with him. If they want extra time with him, he never commits but he always makes them beg for more. Just one coy smile and they’re always putty in his hands. 

When the lights are off and security does one half-assed inspection around the club to make sure there’s no weirdo stragglers hanging around or jerking it in the bathroom, the façade peels off and Zelos faces the one customer he hates the most - himself. When the women see him perform on stage, they don’t look close enough to see all of his imperfections, and if they do, they’re usually too drunk or strung enough to actually give a fuck. They don’t care that his arms and legs are littered with piles upon piles of self-harm scars, neatly criss-crossed in some spots and sloppily applied in others, or that he had enough holes and scars from needles to rival a soldier in action, or that behind his sultry smiles and endless flirtations that his blue eyes twinkle with malice as he wishes each and every one of these bitches dead. 

The meth hasn’t always been his primary mistress, but over the past couple of years he has relied upon her more and more, and ever since his breakup with Sheena six months ago time has kind of blurred like an ultra instinct. It wasn’t necessarily either of their faults ( “I can’t keep doing this! I need you either to commit or we can’t do this anymore.” ), just a typical drifting of them wanting different things ( “At this point if you want money, just ask. Please. That’s all I want from you. I’d rather just give it to you than missing it every morning.” ), and after a few weeks they both agreed on still staying friends ( “I just need a little more time before I can see you again. I can’t…you make me so sick right now. I know you’re hurting, but so am I…” ). 

Zelos’s one rule is to never do hard drugs while on the job, but once he’s finished for the day, the meth gives him everything and makes him feel everything that he can’t grasp while sober - attention, affection, vulnerability, invincibility. He is a child and an adult, a swan and a duck, the top of the world and the pits of hell. 

When he shoots up he is floating, and his only regret is that he has to come down at the end of it.

Lloyd Irving is not the kind of person Zelos comes across in his day-to-day life. When Zelos begrudgingly wakes up in the afternoon, he normally scrolls through mindless TikToks and likes shallow Instagram influencers for an hour or two before he walks the couple of blocks to his usual braindead corporate Starbucks. But today the Starbucks is closed for an indefinite amount of time for renovations, and he has to get his caffeine fix from somewhere, so he tries a local family-owned coffee shop instead.

The inside looks too cozy for his liking. There are comfortable chairs you could sink in, coffee tables littered with books that encourages people to stick around a little while longer, even two retro pinball machines that invite high schoolers and middle aged men alike to crowd around. The owner of the shop, a short, tanned man named Dirk, happily takes Zelos’s order and begins to ring him up at the counter. 

“Let’s see here,” he drawls, squinting at the electronic screen. “One whipped cream caramel macchiato with extra shots of maple syrup…where is the maple syrup button? No, no, that’s not it. No, I don’t want to ring up the lad two macchiatos. You don’t want two macchiatos, do you, son?”

Zelos shakes his head, trying his best not to be a jackass to this poor guy this early in the day because he seems like a legitimately decent person and Martel only knows he doesn’t come across most of those. Dirk grumbles under his breath a few words that he couldn’t understand when a voice rings from the other room, “Don’t worry, Pops, I got it in a sec!”

It’s not love at first sight. The boy that pops in from either an employee room or a stock room is bright, cheerful, wearing a red polo and a dog-printed apron. His eyes are nothing but cheerful as he hovers over his father, tapping a few buttons but speaks to Dirk with zero condescension before whirling his head over to Zelos, smiling with a soft, “Sorry ‘bout that. We got a new system last week and he’s still learning. We can give you an extra macchiato since we’re taking up more of your time if you want.”  

It’s not love at first sight, but for the first time in years Zelos suddenly feels self-conscious about himself as he instinctively hugs his pink oversized hoodie closer to himself. Not that this kid cares, but he usually doesn’t have his first fix until after his coffee, so he has at least that going for him. He’s thin, almost skeletal in comparison to this other guy’s lean figure, porcelain in comparison to this other guy’s healthy glow, and his brain has to do a triple take as to whether he’s taken a shower yet (five minutes but a shower is a shower). 

He wants to accept the natural kindness, take the freebie macchiato and fly higher when he gets home. He looks around and sees father and son grinning and swallows down the animosity he has towards his own father, who killed himself when Zelos was still a child, citing generations of continuous mental illness (yay, trauma) and his mother who was stabbed to death by his father’s whore (and all he gained was more trauma with his cutie-patootie half-sister).

His eyes observe a happy family doing what they love and at that moment he wishes someone would burn down their shop in the middle of the night, preferably with them in it.

“Fuck you. Just give me what I ordered.”

Time passes and the Starbucks is having hiccups in their renovations, and Zelos could go to any coffee shop in the area - they’re all a bunch of boring dime a dozen - but he is drawn to Lloyd’s and Dirk’s shop, over and over. He expects one or both of them to yell at him and shoo him away after his obscene exit the first time, but they both shrug it off, which pisses him off more. The first time he spent five minutes, tops, in there; the second time he spends ten, and by the fourth or fifth visit he’s practically hovering over Lloyd in between serving customers. 

“Everybody seems to love you,” he points out, smirking, “but do you have a special hunny out of all of them? That special someone that makes you hard when your good Christian self idles too long and you need to pass the time?”

Lloyd continues to wipe the table he’s been wiping and looks at him, quirking up a brow. “I used to. We were childhood pals. We dated throughout all of middle school and the first three years of high school. I took her to junior prom.”

“Oh, how sweet,” Zelos fawns, rolling his eyes.

“But we’re not together anymore.”

“Oh?” Zelos perks up with interest. “How much did you fumble, bud? Or were you not good enough in bed for her?”

“Zelos! We don’t…we never did stuff like that. Me and Colette, we…” Lloyd dangles the towel above the table, frowning. “We were great friends, but we never had that special spark that Dad had with Mr. Kratos and that Mr. Kratos apparently had with Mom. We both wanted more but we wanted more of different things. She’s currently studying abroad this year to see if maybe we might change our minds.”

“And do you think you will?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough for her…”

Lloyd’s voice is soft at that point, so raw and vulnerable, that it makes Zelos so pissed that he stomps up to the boy and splashes the can of Poppi he’s been drinking in his face. The brunette splutters and paws at his face, gawking at Zelos with such disbelief. “Zelos, what the heck is wrong with you? Why would you do that?”

“Everything’s wrong with me, bud,” Zelos takes a step back and flips his hair, drilling him down with such a glare that he usually reserves for his landlord and other debt collectors. “Don’t project your self-pitying shit onto the little hunny. Either you want her or you don’t. No need to drag her ass down with your mind games.”

“Huh. I guess I never thought of it that way.”

“You never think, do you? Tell ya what, Lloyd. What if after little Colette comes back with her rendezvous in a different country, I swoop in and steal her? There’s not a woman in the world that can resist my sex appeal.” 

There’s a brief unknown emotion that flickers across Lloyd’s face, and he hesitates for a fraction of a second before he puts on his smile and replies, “I’m sure any girl would be lucky to have you, Zelos. I’m sure Colette would also fall for you just like all the others. Who knows? I might even fall for you.”

The genuine tone of voice, the kindness that is in Lloyd’s brown eyes that has no hint of sarcasm or malice, is all too much for Zelos and he explodes. He grabs a pitcher of iced tea from a nearby broad’s table and throws it all over Lloyd, drenching the kid from head to toe. “You little fucking fairy twink!” he screams, hurling the pitcher so hard against the floor that it bounces. “I wish to Martel that this was gasoline instead of tea so I could just light up a match and burn you alive! You think that you can just FUCK WITH ME?!”

The nearby broads pull up phones, either to film his stupid outburst or call the cops (possibly both), but Lloyd waves his hand down at them, taking a cautious step towards Zelos as if he is a rampaging lion. All Zelos wants to do is blow this kid up with his mind, but he feels his brain short-circuit as he suddenly feels an unfamiliar touch, an unfamiliar embrace, and he feels himself sinking to the ground, tears suddenly bursting from his eyes. “Don’t touch me, don’t fucking touch me, don’tfuckingtouchme .” 

( “I know you’re hurting, but so am I…” )

He doesn’t understand much of what Lloyd’s saying to him after that, but whatever it is it’s not enough to make him want to outright murder the kid, and he allows himself to be led to the other room, which is a makeshift employee breakroom with a beat-up leather couch and a leaking fridge. The lights dim and every sound is white noise and his face hurts from crying so much, and when he’s dug himself out of this tunnel, he sees Lloyd holding onto his hand, squeezing it gently, repeating himself, “Do you have anyone who you could call to take you home?”

“My sister. My little sister,” Zelos croaks, willing himself not to burst into tears again, “She’s in a home right now. Her foster parents won’t let her call me. My ex. She still hates my guts right now. You can call the police, get rid of me faster.”

“No, I said I wouldn’t call the police and I meant it. You just lay here for a while til you calm down, all right?”

If Zelos could find anything in his peripheral, he would’ve thrown it at Lloyd as he shuts the door behind him.

His days and nights begin to get mixed up as he spirals deeper into his mistress’s comforting bosom, and as the days and nights blend together, he desperately wishes that this is the day where he stays afloat in his castle, never to float down.

On the side there’s Lloyd. Always Lloyd, sweet, naïve, unbe liev ably naïve Lloyd, sharing more and more time with him until Zelos is afraid he’ll lose him. There are stretches of days where there are no insults, many sweet words, cute emojis and cat stickers (never ‘I love yous’), where Zelos feels like if he could just make this work, this might be the one, followed by days of left on reads, screaming, throwing things, wishes Lloyd would die or he would die or both or both or both , and it hurts him the most because Lloyd is so patient with him, never raising his voice more than just a stern reprimand.

He knows it’s incredibly unhealthy and he wants to treat Lloyd better, but he doesn’t know where to start and he doesn’t know where normal begins, so he shoots up more and more, cuts himself in more jagged, sloppy lines than neat brownie criss-crosses, and howls back at the moon. Whenever Lloyd wants to spend time with him at one of their places, it’s always Lloyd’s because Zelos can’t be bothered to clean up the needles, the dried up specks of blood on the table and against the wall and smeared all over the TV remote, the puke that crusts in his toilet and kitchen sink and bathroom sink, the clumps of crimson hair that litter his house. He knows that if Lloyd sees the real him, it’ll be Sheena all over again, and this time he knows that if he takes one more blow like this, he’ll end it all for good.

But he knows that he doesn’t fit in at Lloyd’s, either. The boy’s house is just as cozy and welcoming as the coffee shop, and he’s welcome any time of day and night as long as Lloyd’s bedroom door is always open (“I know you’ll be safe whatever you do, but I’m still an old-fashioned soul,” Dirk tells him one day). They bake cookies and watch cheesy Bruce Lee movies. They play board games with Lloyd’s other childhood friend, Genis, and Genis’s sister, Raine, and sometimes he’ll join in on Lloyd’s Discord calls when he talks to Colette. She’s a cute girl, blindingly bright, and not even Zelos can explode at her or make biting remarks. He even offers to send Seles’s socials to her because Martel knows they could both use more friends. 

As the weeks pass Zelos becomes more and more unhinged and more and more upset, because he knows that although he feels the safest when he’s around Lloyd, he also always feels like a stranger. In his experience, kind people are never really kind, and he waits, almost yearns for the day where Lloyd is finally tired of playing nice and dumps him for the piece of shit that he really is. His guard is never let down as Dirk increasingly, although silently, is concerned of him, and doubles so once he realizes that even Lloyd has caught onto his bullshit in some manner. 

That day comes when they’re fooling around, playing domestics in the kitchen while Dirk is out. Once they’re done baking cookies and eating half of them in one sitting, the two of them are on cleaning duty. Lloyd hums happily to himself as he wipes the top counter, saying, “My cookies have really gotten better since you began helping me, Zelos. I can’t wait for Colette to come back and we can have a party and make some for everyone.”

Zelos snorts. “The bar really is that low if you consider cookies that aren’t burnt masterpieces, bud. You wanna impress her, consider diversifying your menu.”

“Well, I’m not just impressing her. I wanna impress everyone else too, especially you.”

“Smooth.” 

He is halfway into drinking his glass of milk when Lloyd bumps into him and the drink spills over his hoodie, which doesn’t bother him at first until Lloyd’s worried tone goes through his ears, “I’m so sorry, Zelos. Let me pull that hoodie off and I’ll run it through the wash real quick.”

“No, Lloyd, don’t!”

But it’s too late as Lloyd pulls off the hoodie, fast at first, then almost in slow-motion, eyes widening. Before him is a masterpiece of destruction - diseased, damned, painful and pathetic and perfect all the same. His navy tank top accentuates his fresh marks, his tracks and cuts, his ups and his downs and his damned, damned, damned super downs. He is a fallen angel himself thrown by Martel to the beasts, where not even the kind can save him. 

There’s nothing at first, which briefly makes Zelos think back to when he was a little boy and he found his father hanging from the ceiling and when he saw Seles’s mother twist the knife into his own mother’s stomach, watching red dripdrop like rubies down a snowy white surface. 

Fear buds into him, but absolute rage blossoms into him - 

-and it all goes to fucking shit.

“...Zelos? What happened to you?”

“I should’ve known never to fucking trust your sorry Candyland ass.”

“You can trust me. I don’t know what’s wrong, but if you just talk to me-”

“-you can’t wave your fucking hands and talk to me and everything will be better, Lloyd! Real life doesn’t fucking work that way!”

“I know, but how long are you gonna shut me out like this? I’ll never understand if you don’t let me in.”

“You want in? You want in?! Last time I let someone in we broke up because she couldn’t handle me anymore and said I couldn’t be fixed! And she was right! I can’t be fixed! I’ll never be fucking fixed because I’ll always fucking hate myself!”

“But I don’t want to fix you and I don’t want to hate you! Whatever you need, I’ll support you.”

“What I need is for you to fucking die. Goodbye, Lloyd.”

He has finally made it. 

Zelos doesn’t know what kind of witchcraft that twerp Mithos did this time, probably blood sacrifice of virgins or fetuses, but he knows that he is floating and he doesn’t think he’s coming down this time, praise Martel. He is warm and he is loved, finally, finally, finally , rose-colored lens finally sitting on the bridge of his nose as his locks drift in the wind. He’s not sure where he began climbing the ladder, but now that ladder has fallen down and he can’t get back down even if he wants to. He threw out his phone and blocked Lloyd, Sheena, Seles on all social media and nail gunned all of his doors so no one could bother him. He quit his job two days ago and told his landlord to just try and sic the ACAB Brigade on him. 

He is free, finally, finally, finally fucking free. 

The one fear that drifts through his mind is that somehow his castle crumbles and he’s left a fucking slobbering idiot vegetable, to which he has that angle thought out as well, a DNR scribbled down on a legal pad somewhere in his apartment. All of his loose ends are tied in a row, and not even Martel can stop him from ascending to where he wants to be. 

Time doesn’t exist now, and he is nothing, and he is everything, the great Chosen. 

Zelos wakes up to a flurry of static that descends into absolute chaos. At first he thinks it’s an angel that’s close to his face, white hair with brilliant blue eyes, but recognition flickers through his brain and he suddenly doesn’t know what to do. The Sage woman. Raine. “I’ve taken out enough where he’s conscious, but he’s not necessarily out of the woods yet,” she murmurs. “If he crashes out again, I might have to call Regal to help.” 

“No worries, I got this.”

The next thing he knows is he’s slammed into a wall as Sheena punches him in the face, sending blood everywhere as she screams a series of noise at him. Blearily, Zelos notices that his door has been kicked down, splinters tossed everywhere into the carpet. He can’t muster up sounds to call her a fucking bitch while her hands are fisting his hair, and he hates that he feels himself hard from her familiar touch. “You stupid bitch, are you fucking kidding me?!” she roars. “You think that just because you wall yourself from everyone that I don’t fucking care about you?! That Lloyd doesn’t fucking care for you?! He’s strong enough not to give up on you when I couldn’t give you anything anymore. You’re not allowed to just crawl up and die and leave the rest of us, you fucking stupid idiot pussy bitch!”

Remnants of his facade attempt to fight as his hand lingers against her shirt, weakly pulling on it. “You never cared after we broke up,” he spits. “We couldn’t make it and you wanted to get rid of me. You probably wish I died without you having to butt in.”

“Shut up.”

“Well, sweetheart, I wish you and I both died, too. Save all of my hunnies grief.”

“Shut UP!”

His cheek stings, and he can barely touch it before Sheena throws him into his coffee table. Paraphernalia flies everywhere and he casually wishes one of the needles would poke his eyes out or something, but instead he looks ragged and pathetic as Lloyd looks down at him. He can’t describe what he’s feeling now because everything is so intense - white, red, panic, rage, apathy - but what wins out the most is a dismal acceptance. Like a snowman he waves his arms against the floor in a grand gesture, laughing with all his might. “Well, Lloyd, do you really want to see the real me?” he booms. “All of my sunshine and rainbows, huh? You really wanna be me and kiss me so bad, my meth addiction and my thousand mental illnesses and my mommy and daddy issues? You wanna see me live comfortably on my nepo baby fund while my sister gets robbed of her state checks every month? You really are a fucked up funny kind of guy, huh?”

He laughs again, and he waits for them to leave. They can play concerned friends all they want, but once they leave, he’s climbing back up and he’s not coming back down. He knows they are all born alone, and they’ll all die alone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. They’re foolish for thinking they could ever try. 

Zelos doesn’t expect, even after all of this, for Lloyd to pull in closer to him. He’s not crying but he’s unbelievably sad as he takes one step, then two, then squeezes Zelos’s hands before chastely kissing him. It’s sweet, and strongly tastes of coffee, and it sends Zelos into a panic he hasn’t felt since his mother died and Seles’s mother was sent to prison and he and Seles were forcibly removed from each other. He wants to claw Lloyd’s face in, curse at him, damn him from when he was born to when he dies.

But his eyes close for a second, then two, as he feels tears falling from his eyes again and he wants Lloyd to never stop and to never let him go.

When their lips part Lloyd’s sitting on his knees, intently staring at him so Zelos can’t escape even if he tries. There’s a brief silence before the boy squeezes his hands again, almost too choked up to speak. “Dad’s known,” he starts in a gravelly voice. “He doesn’t know what, but he’s known. He used to see a lot of his friends get addicted in the war and after the war. He says I can’t fix you. Nobody can except yourself.”

Zelos wills himself not to snort. “Paging Dr. Dirk. What if I don’t want to get fixed? What if I just want a fix?”

Lloyd hesitates, then sighs. He’s stumbling upon his words like an ugly duckling. “I can’t stop you. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good thing, but if I can’t stop you, I can make you want it less and less.” He puts up a hand before Zelos can make a scathing remark. “I know, I know, it doesn’t work that way. You can want it even if you’re the happiest guy in the world.

“But Zelos, all I want is for you to know that you’re safe with me. I won’t enable you, but if you ever need alternatives from doing that or…even if you just want to watch more movies with me or hang out with me and the gang, I want you to feel comfortable with that. I don’t think I’ll ever understand everything about you, but I can try my best.”

Zelos doesn’t know when he can’t breathe, but it’s not because he’s floating into his kingdom but because snot is clogging up his nose and his nostrils are stuffed. He lets Lloyd take him into his arms and cry, and as they cry together Raine contemplates making them breakfast and Sheena yells at her that she’ll let hell freeze over before she allows her into Zelos’s kitchen and offers IHOP as a second choice. Somewhere in his dissociation Dirk’s in his apartment, and instead of beating him up triply than Sheena he adds into the cuddle cringefest and says that he would be proud to have another son, that they can work through his demons and channel them into something beautiful.

And when he is allowed to fall asleep after coffee and two stacks of pancakes, Zelos dreams.

It’s not easy. Zelos is a creature of habit, and he is apt to fail, and fail again, but begins to fail less and less.

Sometimes he relapses. The year is filled with the goods, the bads, and the downright painful and uglies. Zelos tries to forcibly break it off with Lloyd twice, and the second time he’s so overwhelmed that they have to talk him down from a bridge before he splatters his brain as free fish food. By then Colette is back from her study abroad, and she talks him down for hours, reassuring him over and over and over again that Lloyd doesn’t hate him, that if they talk it out they can bounce back.

Colette is an actual angel sent from heaven, and with her assurance he and Lloyd do bounce back, stronger than before. Dirk suggests that instead of immediately stopping hard drugs altogether, he weans himself off with the help of weed, and Zelos has to hand it to the old man, it works. On Dirk’s off days he casually points out his small weed farm out back and begins teaching him the ins and outs of planting, cultivation, science and strains, and Zelos (although reluctantly at first) appreciates his enthusiasm and begins sucking up his enthusiasm for his own benefit. 

He begins smiling again, begins having supervised FaceTime calls with his sister, who can be such a bitch at times but lowkey thanks him for introducing her to Colette. He meets Lloyd’s other dad, Kratos, who is an absolute asshole but does offer him an outlet in kendo and boxing. Zelos gets his literal and metaphorical ass kicked twice a week, but he knows he’s young enough to get better as the time goes by. 

Sometimes he hates himself, and Lloyd loves him for him. Sometimes he attempts to perform, and the others boo him until he is properly himself. Sometimes he cuts himself, and Lloyd, Colette, and Genis decorate his arms and legs with stickers and Sharpie smiles (and sometimes Sheena will make his cut look like a penis with an angry smiley face). 

He bounces, and bounces, and bounces back again. 

He doesn’t give up his apartment yet, even though it’s filled with so many bad memories, but he does spend more time at Lloyd’s and Dirk’s house until he practically lives there. One night he wakes up in the middle of the night because he always was a light sleeper and spends an unknown amount of time just watching Lloyd sleep, sprawled up against his giant dog, Noishe, both slobbering and kicking their limbs for good dreams. It brings a smile to his face, and he kisses his boyfriend on the top of his head as he quietly steps out for a smoke. 

The moon is big and bright as Zelos steps out onto the deck, barefoot, wiggling his toes against the wood as he lights up a cigarette. While not his insurance-sponsored therapist, Presea has had longer and longer conversations with him over the past few weeks, and he finally realizes that being free doesn’t necessarily mean being a lone wolf. His insecurities have consumed him for so long that he lost sight that people can help people, even in the smallest of ways. Besides Sheena and Seles, he doubts that he’s ever had genuine friendships before, and it’s weird at times, but he’s beginning to adjust. 

His eyes wander to the moon, and he thinks of Lloyd. For the first time in his life he feels like he’s the Chosen not because of his many admirers wanting him, but because someone is wholeheartedly loving him, with all of his heart and soul and crappy dyslexic post-it notes every morning. Every day he craves this part of life more and more, and pretty soon he imagines he won’t ever be able to imagine anything else. 

Zelos takes a drag and smiles.

Finally, he is free.